Wobbly impressions

[DJDrache]

Whee!

Those jumps are so precise. This is a challenging game. Oh! I died again. Fortunately it does not have the limited lives and no continue that CT1 supposedly did. It is moderately fun. The monster names are nice. I like the theme and the thin flaky plot layers, though the audio mastering seems a bit weak for a game about music (but I really have no right to complain about that). I haven't gotten to try out the synthesizer yet. I kind of wish I could look to the left or right in levels rather than just up and down, but maybe that would make it too easy.

Needs a silent pause button. Right now I'm making do with just stopping the entire Windows virtual machine if I want to pause for anything else that has audio. And the “exit immediately, or exit to player select screen at which point you must select a player to exit” is unnerving and sort of crazy but tolerable.

I like the layout of the Music Castle, but it's sort of hard to tell where the levels are; a map and zoomed-out full display might be good. (Maybe there's one that I missed that only works if you have the online scorecard active or something?) Yes, there's the arrows, but I can never remember which arrow is pointing to which one that I might or might not have completed most of already, or which way to go to find the other ones. The main melodic riff of the castle music also reminds me of one from a particular Vocaloid song (which you may find incredibly bubbly and cloying, so beware).

And then my Windows virtual machine crashed and my save became toast. Toast! Toasted crackers! I had at least one violet rainbow gem, too! And it took me so many tries to get through Dust Something A in 50 seconds! Noohohooo! Noooooo!

And now I cannot get past the bees in Walnut Creek A again. I suppose I shall be forced to keep an online scorecard in case this happens again. Disky disky, flashy flashy, KVM went crashy crashy.

Please tell me that you used proper atomic file replacement for save files and a well-placed FlushFileBuffers() and that this is merely the QEMU I/O subsystem's fault for scribbling on the disk image somehow when it went down hard. Please. If you just went CreateFile() in overwrite mode I may have to be upset with you on principle. /\‘O.O’/\

[DavidN]

Thanks for your thoughts! There's no map in the game itself, but you can get one from the 100% Completion Guide thread here, in both labelled and just-layout forms.

Sorry about your save, too... if it happens again (and I really hope it doesn't!), I can restore saves that have an online score card. I use a library written by someone else for saving, so I would hope that it's all atomic and failure-safe and everything. <%@v@'q>~,,$

[DJDrache]

I was curious! I couldn't help it. A little tracing in Process Explorer suggests that it is just doing CreateFile in overwrite mode. So (unless I've screwed up the trace, which is entirely possible because I've barely ever done that sort of thing on Windows) it's erasing the old save before (well, “at the beginning of”, but it hardly matters) writing the new one.

I probably don't have to describe in detail why this is bad with regard to preserving user data in the presence of application crashes and power failures and such. o.o

(The good way, FSVO “good”, is to write a temporary file in the same directory, sync it to disk, then rename it over top of the original and possibly sync the directory as well. This is unfortunately laborious, especially on Unixy systems; Windows supposedly has ReplaceFile which might do most of the heavy lifting. Full syncs to disk are also slow, but you're presumably not saving the game state several times per second on a regular basis; if you are then you can do something more complicated with periodic strong checkpoints…)

*gives you the Big Cute Pupilless Irisless Dragon Eyes of Having Possibly Detected Erroneous Handling of Fine Points of Machinery (BCPIDEHPDEHFPM)* /\‘O.O’/\

[DavidN]

Thank you, I will make sure to go and hit the author of said save-handling library with a large hammer.